For a long time, I thought silence was protecting me. I thought if I didn't say something out loud, maybe it wouldn't feel real. If I didn't tell people, I could keep moving forward and pretend I was still the woman I had been before HIV entered my life. But silence doesn't make something disappear. Sometimes, silence makes it grow.
This is the first time I'm telling this part of my story publicly.
It was December 7th, 2022.
Its was a normal day like any other.
The call came from the health department.
They told me that my name had been given to them by someone who had tested positive for HIV.
They never told me who that person was.
They didn't have to.
I already knew who it was that had given my name.
He wasn't exactly my boyfriend. But he had became my bestfriend. We met in August 2020. The year the world shut down due to the covid pandemic. I was stuck to him like glue in no time and on December 21st I found out I was pregnant. But just three days later our relationship would become complicated in ways I didn't always know how to explain.
On Christmas Eve I learned his secrets when something told me to go through his phone after he fell asleep. I found his Grindr account with multiple conversations, along with several photos.
[I]f I am going to talk about breaking the silence, I cannot only tell the parts of my story that make me look strong.
The next day i confronted him.
He denied it and would continue to deny it for years. Even after I had seen what I had seen, he denied it.
And I stayed.
We were expecting a child.
I told myself that maybe things could change. Maybe we could work through it. Becoming parents would give us something worth holding onto, right? So i stayed and we welcomed a beautiful baby boy in late August.
I didn't know then how much that decision to stay would eventually change my story.
A year later I would receive the call that changed me. I didn't know how to face it AND everything else already on my plate.
I sat on that information for nearly three months. I didn't say a word to anyone.
Nearly three months of knowing that something might be wrong, but not knowing how to make myself confront it.
And while I was carrying that fear, life kept happening. My mother and I weren't on the best terms but I love her regardless and when she suffered a minor heart attack it scared me a lot.
Then I lost my grandmother, which hit me in a way I wasn't prepared for.
I was already trying to survive the breakdown of my marriage. My ex-husband had taken our three daughters, and I wasn't allowed to be involved in their lives the way I once was. The way I wanted to be. There were years of going back and forth.
Years of fighting to remain connected to my children.
I had contracted HIV after my son was born. But a year after my diagnosis, my depression would get the best of me. I was all alone and the family that was nearby wasn't willing to help. The struggle was real. I found myself living in a pop-up camper with my son. My mother was mad that I had chosen to take my son to the camper instead of letting her keep him. She made a report to CPS just two days after we had gotten into a huge argument. I began a losing battle with CPS. The battle within myself felt almost as big. I always wondered if my diagnosis had any effect on my local CPS department's motives. My son was placed in foster care in 2024, where he remains today.
I was losing pieces of my life while trying desperately to hold onto the pieces I had left.
It took almost three months after I had received that call before I went to be tested. I think I already knew.
Sure enough, I was HIV positive.
The diagnosis didn't immediately end our relationship. In total, I would spend nearly five years with him.
Five years of loving someone who had become my best friend. Five years of trying to make sense of the things I had discovered, the things he denied, and eventually, the diagnosis that changed my life.
Whatever the reason, I stayed longer than I probably should have.
Then, right at five years after meeting him, he moved to another state.
He left me behind and I was devastated.
I was losing someone who had been such a significant part of my life for years.
That kind of loss doesn't happen all at once.
It happens in pieces. And by then, I was still struggling with depression.
By 2025, my HIV had progressed to AIDS.
I want my voice to be bigger than what happened to me.
That is one of the hardest sentences I have ever written. But I am writing it.
Because if I am going to talk about breaking the silence, I cannot only tell the parts of my story that make me look strong.
I have to tell the truth.
There were years when I didn't take care of myself.
There were years when depression made it difficult to see a future worth fighting for.
There were years when I didn't understand that taking care of my HIV was also an act of choosing myself.
But I'm still here.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that my silence couldn't be the end of my story.
I don't want to tell this story simply to talk about the person I believe exposed me.
I don't want revenge to be the reason I speak.
I want my voice to be bigger than what happened to me.
My journey eventually led me toward something bigger than my own story. That dream became Silence Unsealed, an organization I hope will help people struggling with HIV and mental health find their voices, find support, and understand that their lives still have value.
For years, I thought my silence was a place to hide.
Now I'm turning it into a reason to speak.
Because the greatest threat surrounding HIV isn't always the virus itself.
Sometimes, it's the silence surrounding it.
And after years of carrying mine, I'm finally ready to unseal it.
This is my story.
And this is only the beginning.
